Trajectories of human conflict have direct and indirect impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem function. These occur across terrestrial, marine and freshwater systems via the well-established drivers of biodiversity loss: land and sea-use change, climate change, overexploitation, pollution and invasive species. However, the mechanisms underlying the nature of some of these connections are still poorly explored, as is the compilation of existing evidence. Furthermore, indirect drivers, spillover effects, and synergistic relationships between drivers are additional knowledge gaps. Building a full picture requires exploring the magnitude and directionality of impacts within the wider context of socioeconomic change and geopolitics with which conflict is associated. As this knowledge advances, conflict in its diverse forms is likely to emerge as the most overlooked and significant indirect driver of biodiversity loss internationally. Additionally, it is our greatest challenge in achieving sustainable development, specifically due to the primacy of its influence on all other sustainability challenges.

Despite the critical importance of small-scale fisheries for food security and well-being and the role of fishers as stewards of aquatic ecosystems, their future is uncertain. Tackling narratives that portray small-scale fisheries as obsolete, disparate, and inefficient requires collectively imagining and articulating new, creative, and inspiring narratives that reflect their real contributions and enable transformative futures. Drawing on a transdisciplinary country -level case study, we analyze the process and outcomes of co -creating desirable, plural, and meaningful visions of the future for small-scale fisheries in Uruguay. Using an arts -based approach and leveraging the agency of emerging innovative initiatives throughout the country, different food system actors (fish workers, chefs, entrepreneurs) and knowledge systems (local, experience -based, and scientific) were engaged in a creative visioning process. The results of this artsbased co -creation process include (1) a series of desirable visions and narratives, synthesized into an artistic boundary object; and (2) the stepping stones to a transformative space for collective reflection, learning, and action. Although the artistic boundary object has proven instrumental among multiple and diverse participants, the transformative space encouraged academic and non-academic participants to plan collective actions and to feel more confident, motivated, and optimistic about the future of small-scale fisheries in Uruguay. With this paper we provide a tool, a platform, and a roadmap to counter the dominant bleak narrative, while also communicating the elements that constitute desirable futures for small-scale fisheries in Uruguay. On a broader scale, our contribution reinforces the emerging narrative of the key role that small-scale fisheries have, and will play, in local and global food systems.

Landscapes have typically been produced by varied, diverse, and long-term interactions between people and nature. However, most landscape planning and ecosystem service mapping approaches focus on the biophysical aspects of landscapes rather the social. Spatial representations of people's perceptions, mental models, and local knowledge of ecosystem services can be created using participatory mapping. This study uses participatory mapping to identify how peoples' perceptions of provisioning, regulating and cultural ecosystem service supply areas coincide or mismatch with the landscapes features of two Mediterranean river basin areas in north-eastern Catalonia, Spain. We found that the random forest and geographically weighted regression techniques are able to strongly associate landscape features with stakeholders' perceptions of ecosystem supply areas. These results demonstrate that the stakeholders associate various geographic elements with different types of ecosystem service supply areas. Visible geographical features, such as a reservoir, mountains, wetlands, showed great importance in the perception of supply areas of ecosystem services, compared to ecological or biophysical indicators, when mapping and spatially associating certain benefits to ecosystem services supply areas. These findings reveal that, often, the ecological processes and dynamics of functioning of ecosystems are invisible and not fully understood. We argue that integrating these aspects into participatory landscape planning, policies and practice can make the invisible visible and, consequently, increase the understanding for a more targeted and effective management. This could allow stakeholders to better understand the ecological processes behind the visible geographic features of the landscape, fostering a shared knowledge and better environmental management outcomes.

Science today defines resilience as the capacity to live and develop with change and uncertainty, which is well beyond just the ability to ‘bounce back’ to the status quo. It involves the capacity to absorb shocks, avoid tipping points, navigate surprise and keep options alive, and the ability to innovate and transform in the face of crises and traps. Five attributes underlie this capacity: diversity, redundancy, connectivity, inclusivity and equity, and adaptive learning. There is a mismatch between the talk of resilience recovery after COVID-19 and the latest science, which calls for major efforts to align resilience thinking with sustainable development action.

The United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development 2021-2030 (the 'Ocean Decade') is poised to stimulate new cooperation for ocean science, but makes no mention of conflict or peace. We contend that this is a missed opportunity, and use an environmental peacebuilding typology to review how ocean science has historically contributed to peace. Such considerations are timely in the context of an increasingly complex and multidimensional ocean risk landscape, due among other things to unprecedented growth in the extent and intensity of ocean uses, and increasing conflict potential as the ocean becomes a more crowded and coveted place. We conclude by proposing the Ocean Decade Implementation Plan be appended to include an eighth intended outcome: 'A Peaceful Ocean'.

Achieving sustainability in the Anthropocene requires radical changes to how human societies operate. The Seeds of Good Anthropocenes (SOGA) project has identified a diverse set of existing initiatives, called “seeds,” that have the potential to catalyze transformations toward more sustainable pathways. However, the empirical investigation of factors and conditions that enable successful sustainability transformations across multiple cases has been scarce. Building on a review of existing theoretical and empirical research, we developed a theoretical framework for assessing three features identified as important to transformative potential of innovative social-ecological initiatives: (1) learning practices, (2) empowerment, and (3) networking. We applied this framework to a set of African-led and Africa-related initiatives that we selected from the SOGA database that were divided into initiatives with more or less transformative potential. We coded the presence or absence of features relating to the theoretical framework using secondary data, and then compared the initiatives using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). This analysis revealed that of the three features tested, Networking emerged as the most important feature for transformative potential when compared amongst cases. By developing and testing a framework for the comparison of cases we provide a basis for future comparative work to further identify and test properties of cases that enable transformation.

Social-ecological interactions have been shown to generate interrelated and reoccurring sets of ecosystem services, also known as ecosystem service bundles. Given the potential utility of the bundles concept, along with the recent surge in interest it is timely to reflect on the concept, its current use and potential for the future. Based on our ecosystem service bundle experience, expertise, and ecosystem service bundle analyses, we have found critical elements for advancing the utility of ecosystem service bundle concept and deepening its impact in the future. In this paper we 1) examine the different conceptualizations of the ecosystem service bundle concept; 2) show the range of benefits of using a bundles approach; 3) explore key issues for improving research on ecosystem service bundles, including indicators, scale, and drivers and relationships between ecosystem services; and 4) outline priorities for the future by facilitating comparisons of ecosystem service bundle research. 

Food is essential to people and is one of the main ways in which people are connected to the world’s ecosystems. However, food systems often cause ecosystem degradation and produce ill-health, which has generated increasing calls to transform food systems to be more sustainable. The Swedish food system is currently undergoing substantial change. A varied set of local actors have created alternative sustainability initiatives that enact new ways of doing, thinking, and organizing. These actors can increase the transformative impact of their initiatives through multiple actions and a variety of amplification processes. We analyzed the actions adopted by 29 food initiatives active in the Stockholm region using information available online. We conducted 11 interviews to better understand the amplification processes of speeding up (i.e., accelerating impact), scaling up (i.e., influencing higher institutional levels), and scaling deep (i.e., changing values and mind-sets). Our results indicated that the initiatives mainly seek to stabilize and grow their impact while changing the awareness, values, and mind-sets of people concerning the food they consume (scaling deep). However, these approaches raise new questions about whether these actions subvert or reinforce current unsustainable and inequitable system dynamics. We suggest there are distinct steps that local and regional governments could take to support these local actors via collaborations with coordinated forms of initiatives, and fostering changes at the municipality level, but these steps require ongoing, adaptive approaches given the highly complex nature of transformative change and the risks of reinforcing current system dynamics. 

Landscapes and their management are at the center of many of the sustainability challenges that we face. Landscapes can be described as social-ecological systems shaped by a myriad of human activities and biophysical processes, interacting across space and time. Managing them sustainably requires considering this complexity. Resilience thinking offers ways to address complexity in decision-making. In this paper, we analyse the learning and impact on a diverse group of local actors from participating in a participatory resilience assessment. The assessment, focused on sustainable landscape management in the Helge a catchment, Sweden, produced concrete knowledge outputs, describing ecosystem service bundles, a future vision, conceptual system models, and a strategic action plan. Follow-up interviews indicate that the process and its outputs supported the participants' learning process and helped them to articulate complexity thinking in practice. The outputs, and the exercises to produce them, emerged as complementary in supporting this articulation. Furthermore, they helped build participants' capacity to communicate the diverse values of the landscape to others and to target leverage points more strategically. Thus, it supported the application of resilience thinking in landscape management, especially by generating learning and fostering complex adaptive systems thinking.

Addressing sustainability challenges in landscape management requires processes for co-producing usable knowledge together with those who will use that knowledge. Participatory futures methods are powerful tools for attaining such knowledge. The applications of such methods are diverse and understanding the intricacies of the knowledge co-production process is important to further develop these research practices. To improve participatory futures methods and contribute to systematic and critical reflections on methodology, we present a comparative analysis of four research projects that applied participatory futures methods in the same study area. Conducted between 2011 and 2020, these projects aimed to co-produce knowledge about the future provision of ecosystem services in the Helge a catchment area in southern Sweden. For structuring the post-hoc, self-reflexive analysis, we developed a framework dividing the knowledge co-production process into three dimensions: settings, synthesis and diffusion. We based the analysis on documentation from the projects, a two-step questionnaire to each research team, a workshop with co-authors and interviews with key participants. The comparison highlights steps in project decision-making, explicit and implicit assumptions in our respective approaches and how these assumptions informed process design in the projects. Our detailed description of the four knowledge co-production processes points to the importance of flexibility in research design, but also the necessity for researchers and other participants to adapt as the process unfolds.